The Cleanest Race (9 page)

It goes without saying that this propaganda could not be further removed from a Marxist worldview. There is, after all, a great difference between patriotic or state-nationalist communism à la Tito’s Yugoslavia, and the North Koreans’ belief in their innate moral superiority to all other peoples. But for obvious reasons the regime does not advance its race theory
explicitly enough to offend its dwindling group of foreign friends. It has little need to be explicit, however, for there is no other worldview inside North Korea against which it must assert itself.
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Occasionally Kim Il Sung will be quoted as having said, for example, “Korea’s citizens are homogenous; therefore they have strong brotherly love,” or his son quoted as saying that “our people is … the purest and cleanest in the world.”
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But the official race theory is generally propagated more through omission and implication. By stressing that Koreans exhibited “lofty moral attitudes” from the earliest stages of their civilization, and by leaving out the positive mention of formative influences on the national character—Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and shamanism are all denounced—the masses are given no choice but to infer that they are born virtuous.
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No physical superiority over other races is claimed. Propaganda freely acknowledges, for example, that Americans are much taller.
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Nor is superior intelligence asserted with any real conviction, though Kim Jong Il has described Koreans as “sensible” and “prudent,” and propaganda acclaims the will power they show in the face of adversity.
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To be uniquely virtuous in an evil world but not uniquely cunning or strong is to be as vulnerable as a child, and indeed, history books convey the image of a perennial child-nation on the world stage, wanting only to be left in peace yet subjected to endless abuse and contamination from outsiders. Films and novels routinely show invaders mistreating Korean children. A standard image of the colonial era is of an exhausted little girl turning a rotary grain mill.
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The race’s historical vulnerability to attack is ascribed to the absence of a great leader who could turn its purity into
a source of unity and strength. Since the advent of Kim Il Sung, Koreans can and should indulge their pure childlike instincts. For this reason the party poses as a nurturing, protective mother. The
Rodong sinmun
newspaper explained the metaphor in 2003:

Accordingly, citizens are expected to behave like children. The following is an excerpt from “Mother” (Ǒmŏni), one of the country’s best-known poems.

It goes without saying that this state-sponsored infantilism exerts a strong psychological appeal. Erich Fromm wrote of
how man’s fear of emerging from the warm security of the family keeps him “in the prison of the motherly racial-national-religious fixation.”
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No less obvious is the incompatibility of this propaganda with Marxism-Leninism. Believing that “the people is an eternal child,” as the French revolutionary Saint-Just famously remarked, Lenin saw the communist party’s
raison d’être
in forcing it to grow up.
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The Soviet party posed as an educating father, as did the dictator who so famously talked of the need to “re-engineer” the human soul. A leading American scholar of Stalinist culture has shown that the so-called spontaneity-consciousness dialectic forms the master plot of socialist realist fiction.
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Nikolai Ostrovsky’s
How the Steel Was Tempered
(Kak zakalyalas’ stal’, 1936), for example, tells how a party cadre, armed with the teachings of Lenin and Stalin, educates a headstrong youth into a politically conscious “positive hero.”

In contrast, the DPRK’s propaganda is notably averse to scenes of intellectual discipline. Because Koreans are born pure and selfless, they can and should heed their instincts. Often they are shown breaking out of intellectual constraints in a mad spree of violence against the foreign or land-owning enemy.
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Cadres are expected to nurture, not teach, and bookworms are negative characters. In short: where Stalinism put the intellect over the instincts, North Korean culture does the opposite. When a sympathetic British documentary about life in the DPRK entitled
A State of Mind
(2004) was shown in Pyongyang, the authorities changed the title to “Maŭm ŭi nara,” or
The Country of Heart.
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How do artists depict this spontaneous child race? The men in posters are robust but boyish, with somewhat swarthy
complexions, thick eyebrows, square jaws and full lips, the women plump but girlish, with round pale faces and low nose bridges. For all the stylization the faces are recognizably Korean, and although replicating the ideal is more difficult in movies than in posters, most of the country’s film stars come close.
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The men’s hair is always short, the women’s usually above the shoulders and permed. Little boys’ heads are shaven on the sides while young girls sport neat bobs. (To counter the infiltration of South Korean hairstyles, the propaganda apparatus emphasizes the advantages of a very short “military-first” cut.)
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The physiognomic ideal admits of little variation. A worker in one painting appears much like a farmer or a soldier in another, while the children pictured in school textbooks are virtually identical.
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We have all seen clips of the Arirang mass games in which scores of children of the same height, body type and hairstyle dance and leap in
unison. These games are not the grim Stalinist exercises in anti-individualism that foreigners (such as the makers of the aforementioned documentary) often misperceive them as, but joyous celebrations of the pure-bloodedness and homogeneity from which the race’s superiority derives.

The term “military first” does not mean that the armed forces lead the party; rather it is the party which, in accordance with Kim Jong Il’s will, puts the military first. It is also the party’s own propaganda that puts the armed forces on a high pedestal. Yet this glorification is often so extravagant as to make it appear that the party is abdicating at least part of its traditional role. Visual depictions of the new society tend to show a soldier (massive forearm outstretched, mouth open in a shout) leading the way for factory workers, farmers and scientists. The TV evening news often quotes Kim Jong Il as calling the military “the university of the revolution,” and “a magnificent school of ideological, intellectual and physical training.”
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(One wonders where this leaves the nation’s women, most of whom do not go through this school.) The soldier is also held up as a model for all to emulate, which is not necessarily the case with the party cadre. (The latter is a much less prominent and heroic figure in North Korean narrative than in the socialist realism of the old East Bloc.)
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Kim Jong Il is said to “love warriors most of all.”
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The DPRK’s cult of military life is different from its Prussian or Japanese counterparts in that training is seen as going with and not against the grain of the recruit’s instincts. Discipline is all well and good, but must never diminish the race’s unique spontaneity. Indeed, in one “historical” novel from the 1950s, Kim Il Sung commands the headstrong young protagonist
to stay away from the guerilla fighting in the hope that this order will be disregarded!
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The film
The Youths of the SS Seagull
(Kalmaegiho ch’ǒngnyǒndŭl, 1961) invites the audience to side with the boyish hero as he cheerfully flouts the rules of his ship, annoying superiors no end. Needless to say, he does so for the sake of the collective, overstaying his shore leave to win a prize pig for his crewmates’ dinner, and so on. Still, such a story would have been inconceivable in the USSR.

Even in war, soldiers are depicted as overgrown children. A tank driver in the story
Tank No. 214
(Ttangkǔ 214 ho, 1953):

For all the army-as-school rhetoric, depictions of life in uniform dwell more on its healthy fraternal joys than its intellectual or physical rigors.
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Boisterousness is smiled upon as the mark of truly Korean naivety and innocence. In 2006 a magazine article told approvingly of soldiers who vaulted a fence in a mad rush to welcome Kim Jong Il’s sedan.
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There has been no shortage of historical incidents—from the Panmunjom axe-killings of 1976 to the recent shooting of a South Korean tourist at the Kumgangsan resort, to say nothing of
the army’s maraudings during the famine—which indicate that this celebration of instinctive behavior has affected the culture of the real-life military. This in turn seems to have contributed to a certain friction between the military and the civilian population. At the very least, the latter is not unenvious of the special position accorded to the former. Hence the media’s constant and strident emphasis on the need for unity and cooperation between soldiers and civilians.
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At the time of writing (autumn 2009), a so-called “100 Day Battle” is in progress. Enthusiasm campaigns to boost production were a fixture in the socialist bloc too, but in North Korea economic growth is less an end in itself than a means to strengthen the country. (The parallel to the German
Wehrwirtschaft
and the Japanese “self-defense state” of the 1930s is obvious.)
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To get the masses in the proper spirit, the regime compares workers to warriors, and, if the nightly news is anything to go by, hangs signs reading “battleground” in factories.

Whether soldiers, workers or farmers, the heroes in official narratives differ from other characters only in degree: they are that little bit more Korean—more virtuous and pure—than everyone else. Despite the growing focus on the armed forces, which remain predominantly male, young females are still more common in propaganda stories than men. This is not because women are considered fully equal, let alone superior, to men, but because they are more natural symbols of chastity and purity and thus of Koreanness. The most popular character in the peninsula’s folk tradition is Ch’unhyang, a girl punished for refusing to yield to a lecherous official. Her story has been filmed several times in North as in South Korea.
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Girls have the added advantage of being able to embody both the childlike attitude of the model subject and the nurturing, maternal attitude expected from authority figures. Nurses and female doctors are common heroines. The Text usually shows them as having grown up in fatherless and therefore more spontaneous surroundings. They behave girlishly even in adulthood, blushing at the drop of a hat and covering their mouths when they smile. Squeaky-clean teasing about boyfriends results in giggling mock-chases.
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One could not be further removed from the tough, emancipated heroines of socialist realist fiction.